gamblor01
Well-Known Member
UPDATE:
This review has changed a bit since I first posted. The main change is that I have moved the M9 camera from the list of cons to pros after receiving update 1.32.531.33 on my phone. Whatever HTC did it's like magic. I'm a much bigger fan of the upgrade now, as all of my complaints with moving from the M8 to M9 are negligible now. Anyway, here is my review...
I debated quite a bit before the M9 launch whether or not I would upgrade. I loved my M7 and I loved my M8, so I figured I would love my M9. Quite honestly, the M9 is extremely similar to the M8. It's iterative, with some changes for the better and others perhaps not. However, with the camera performance significantly improved I can now proudly state that it is great phone. They upped the build quality this time with metal wrapping around to the front and covering the speakers. As with with M7 and M8, it's a premium smartphone and it looks and feels like one.
In case there are other folks out there debating on making the switch, I thought I would post my opinions on the change. These opinions are of course my own, and may not apply to everyone and are not meant to inspire holy wars as to which phone/manufacturer/etc. is better. Hopefully it is helpful to some extent anyway, and I'll try to update it as I discover more information.
To be fair -- while I was previously somewhat critical of the M9 in this post (mostly because of the camera which has since been fixed), I still recommend either the M8 or the M9 as *THE* phone to buy to all of my friends. HTC makes some really great stuff, their Uh Oh Protection is downright awesome, they seem to listen to their customers, and they are honest and responsive about software updates. Did my M8 get Lollipop before 90 days? No -- but it's not entirely HTC's fault and they also came really, really close to delivering on time (for T-Mobile anyway).
So without further ado...
What's better?
What's worse?
Other thoughts
This review has changed a bit since I first posted. The main change is that I have moved the M9 camera from the list of cons to pros after receiving update 1.32.531.33 on my phone. Whatever HTC did it's like magic. I'm a much bigger fan of the upgrade now, as all of my complaints with moving from the M8 to M9 are negligible now. Anyway, here is my review...
I debated quite a bit before the M9 launch whether or not I would upgrade. I loved my M7 and I loved my M8, so I figured I would love my M9. Quite honestly, the M9 is extremely similar to the M8. It's iterative, with some changes for the better and others perhaps not. However, with the camera performance significantly improved I can now proudly state that it is great phone. They upped the build quality this time with metal wrapping around to the front and covering the speakers. As with with M7 and M8, it's a premium smartphone and it looks and feels like one.
In case there are other folks out there debating on making the switch, I thought I would post my opinions on the change. These opinions are of course my own, and may not apply to everyone and are not meant to inspire holy wars as to which phone/manufacturer/etc. is better. Hopefully it is helpful to some extent anyway, and I'll try to update it as I discover more information.
To be fair -- while I was previously somewhat critical of the M9 in this post (mostly because of the camera which has since been fixed), I still recommend either the M8 or the M9 as *THE* phone to buy to all of my friends. HTC makes some really great stuff, their Uh Oh Protection is downright awesome, they seem to listen to their customers, and they are honest and responsive about software updates. Did my M8 get Lollipop before 90 days? No -- but it's not entirely HTC's fault and they also came really, really close to delivering on time (for T-Mobile anyway).
So without further ado...
What's better?
- Several more LTE bands are supported, at least for the T-Mobile version. This was one of the main reasons, if not *THE* reason, I wanted to move from the M8 to the M9. The T-Mobile variant of the M8 supports only 2 LTE bands, and the 1900MHz frequency (band 2) is *NOT* one of them. T-Mobile has been using 1900MHz, particularly in rural areas, to build out their network. Oddly enough, the AT&T M8 supports MANY more LTE bands, as do the unlocked and developer editions (but you don't get wifi calling like the T-Mobile version does). I'm not sure why T-Mobile didn't push to have their M8 include support for *ALL* of the frequencies they use to broadcast LTE, especially when other versions of the same phone clearly support them. In any case, someone seemed to get the hint for the M9 and it now supports the following LTE bands according to their website: "LTE: 2, 3, 4, 7, 12, 17". Hopefully now when we travel and take road trips, my service will be more on par with my wife's AT&T service. I can update this post with real-world results as I visit family across the country in the coming months. Right now it's still a (promising) pipe dream that my service will be vastly improved. In major metropolitan areas, such as my hometown of Austin, Texas, T-Mobile of course offers wonderful service.
- The camera! I originally listed this as a con of the upgrade but after receiving update 1.32.531.33 the M9 is a clear winner here. While I never thought the M8's camera was stellar, it *was* considerably better than the M9. I took the same photos with both cameras and the M9's clarity was atrocious. Then I updated my M9 and WOW what a huge difference. I didn't take very many pictures with my M9 before getting the update, but here is one example. We are building a playhouse/home office in my backyard and I finished laying the floors and sent a picture to my wife. This is a shot of the floors before getting the camera update. You're free to inspect the metadata of these shots, but the flash is ON in this picture:
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dropbox.com/s/w3tzctchx0wx7fn/m9-before-flash.jpg?dl=0&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEB3V4eYAO8phsw4GMJ15NkH1k7rg
Here is the same picture after receiving the update, also with the flash ON:
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dropbox.com/s/9bikbafa2wnlr8s/m9-after-flash.jpg?dl=0&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGZ_MkP5pV7zJp7f_TsKwYO2yB5RA
It's just night and day difference. Examine the floor and the A/C unit. They are a blur in the original picture and now they are MUCH sharper -- particularly the floor. For grins I forced the flash OFF and took another shot. Even this is stellar compared to what it was before the update:
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dropbox.com/s/miibiog1tp4hj7q/m9-after-no-flash.jpg?dl=0&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFyh7anfIjka-Biinr6Q--X9ynJ0Q
I'm a bit irked that HTC let the phone ship with such poor camera performance, but at least they fixed it quickly. And what an amazing difference. This post below does an excellent job of demonstrating shots before and after the update. I know many people criticized it saying that the lens was clearly smudged in the first set of shots but I can attest that my camera now performs significantly better than before. Smudged or not, the vast improvement is real.
http://phandroid.com/2015/04/09/htc-one-m9-camera-update-comparison/
- The flashlight is finally usable in quick settings! I repeat, the flashlight can finally be toggled on and off in quick settings! Yay! I did notice a somewhat odd bug in that I can two-finger swipe with the phone locked and turn ON the flashlight without needing to draw my lock screen pattern. Ready to turn the flashlight OFF now? Oddly enough if you tap the notification on the lock screen then you have to enter your lock screen password to do so. However, if you pull down the quick settings with another two-finger swipe then you can turn the flashlight off without needing to enter your password. Seems like a slight bug that will hopefully be fixed in a future software update.
- A new processor and 3GB of RAM (instead of 2GB) further "future proofs" the phone. This is always a given bonus of each upgrade, but it's always a welcome one. So far the M9 feels very fluid and responsive. I did some side by side tests prior to selling my M8 and for the most part, they were identical. I did notice some smoother animations for example in the gmail app (when you exit out of a message and it rotates the back arrow and changes into the menu icon). Overall however, they are both solid and roughly identical.
- Gestures like double tap to wake, swipe up to unlock, etc. can now be *individually* enabled or disabled. On the M8, you either got all of the gestures, or you got none. I really liked the double-tap to wake the screen gesture (especially since the phone is so tall and the power button is hard to reach) but I kept accidentally triggering so many of the other gestures that I had to disable them all. With the M9 I can enable the double-tap, and disable all of the rest. THANK YOU HTC!
What's worse?
- A minor bug, but the auto-brightness control doesn't seem to be as responsive as the M8. I have often seen the screen stay dim when I move into brighter areas and it's difficult to read. I sometimes have to turn the phone around and point it directly at the light source, or just keep waiting. It seems to eventually notice the brighter ambient light and increase the brightness on the screen, but it's not nearly as quick to change as the M8 does. Seems like a software update is required to improve upon this.
- This more of a minor annoyance than any performance issue, but the power button is just below the volume buttons, and it's easy to mistake volume down for power and vice versa. I would have preferred the power button stay on the top of the phone, or they could have at least separated the power button and put it on the other side of the phone, away from the volume buttons. Having them all right next to each other is confusing. Luckily, since I can enable double-tap to wake my phone, I mostly use that to wake up the phone and avoid the power button entirely (except to turn off the display). However, I do seem to be getting more and more accustomed to the buttons the more I use the phone.
- They took away the flashlight app, with the 3 different brightness levels. As I said above, I love that you can now interact with the flashlight via quick settings, but come on HTC, don't take away the app you had. It was REALLY GOOD. Please bring it back. I would love to have the flashlight in quick settings, but then long tap on it to enter in the full app with 3 different intensity levels. That would be heaven. Note that I tried pulling the apk from my M8 and installing it on the M9 but it just crashes. Seems like the frameworks aren't compatible.
- The stocks app is gone. Call me crazy, but I actually used it. It was an easy way to see positive/negative changes in stocks, and didn't use much battery life (especially because I didn't have it sync ever -- just update when opened). I know lots of people think it's bloatware, but I liked it. It seems like all of the apps for tracking stocks in the play store are the bloatware -- they come with advertisements, news updates, and more. I just want to know if the stocks I'm tracking went up or down, and by how much. It's an easy way to track when to sell and when to hold. The HTC stocks app fit the bill perfectly. I wish HTC would continue to include it. Heck they could even load it on the /data partition so that those who don't want it could simply uninstall it (rather than putting it on the /system partition which isn't writable without root). Like the flashlight app, I tried pulling the apk from my M8 and installing on the M9 but it just crashes. Dang.
Other thoughts
- Just like the M8, the phone is still too tall. I would like to see the black bar below the display with the HTC logo completely removed. If they did this, the phone would be almost the exact same dimensions as the M7, which in my opinion was the *PERFECT* sized phone. Then the power button could be moved to the top again -- yay! I'm of course completely ignorant of the technical limitations of the phone's design, but the new MotoX is very similar to the M7's size and it's wonderful to hold. The Nexus 6 was even able to pack stereo speakers without requiring some giant waste of real estate below the display. I'm confident that HTC can come up with an innovative solution to solve whatever technical problem that black bar is currently solving.
- Despite having a larger battery than the M8, I don't feel like battery life improved much if at all, though the good news is that it didn't seem to get any worse. I know this isn't entirely HTC's fault as battery technologies just haven't kept up with the pace of advancements in hardware design, but it's always nice to get a marginal bump in battery life. The M9 doesn't really seem to offer anything over the M8. Too bad there is no parallel to Moore's law for battery technology.
- The phone can get a bit warm when the CPU is pushed, though it's certainly not going to burn your hand or anything. It might get marginally hotter than the M8 (I have zero scientific evidence one way or the other), but any reports of it burning things or being too hot to handle are just nonsense. The phone's temperature is well within normal and acceptable limits folks. Don't believe everything you read out there...except for this post of course!
- I'm not a huge fan of all of the white added in Sense 7. This includes things like the phone dialer and the keyboard. I really liked the subdued charcoal grey color the M8 had with Sense 6. You might wonder why this even matters -- the main reason is that at night when everything is dark, our pupils of course dilate to let in more light. Late at night when everyone else is asleep I would get a text and then go to respond. I open the keyboard and BAM! The white color can be pretty intensely bright, even with the screen brightness turned all the way down. I have a very dark wallpaper for the very same reason. The grey on the M8 just isn't so piercing. It would be wonderful to select which color we prefer, just like the Messaging app which can be customized.
- This is both a pro and a con, but the edges of the M9 have some sharper corners instead of the smooth, rounded edges of the M8. It's a pro because it provides additional grip so that the phone doesn't just slide out of your hand, but it isn't quite as pleasant to hold as the M8 with those little corners digging into your hand (no it's not actually painful). I don't personally care as I used a case on both phones, but just something I noticed for those of you who might want to go without a case.
- Speaking of cases, I have tried a few now. I first went with the Spigen Neo hybdrid case with metallized buttons. I'm not a fan. It's adds a considerable amount of bulk and I thought it was a bit slippery in my hand. I also didn't like the 2-layer design. At that point I ordered a Diztronic TPU case (what I used on my M8) and HTC's clear shield. They are both fine cases, but I ultimately decided to stick with HTC's clear shield. It's grippy when you hold it yet slides in and out of pockets with ease, adds *VERY* minimal bulk, covers up the sharp edges of the phone, and shows off the beauty of the phone. I'm not sure how shock absorbent the case is -- it seems like the Diztronic TPU case would be better in that respect as it's flexible material while the clear case is fairly rigid -- but I decided to roll with the HTC case anyway. I really like it. It even fits in my arm band for running without even needing to remove the case. Score! Very well done HTC. Here is the link:
http://www.htc.com/us/accessories/?intcid=nav_us#!pid=htc-one-m9&acc=htc-clear-shield-m9
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